A Topic Model Approach to Studying Agenda Formation for the U.S. Supreme Court

Abstract

Study of agenda formation in the U.S. Supreme Court is one of the most long-standing in empirical legal studies. This paper exploits a relatively new approach to quantitative text analysis - topic modeling - to provide a new lens on agenda formation, and specifically how the subject matter of Supreme Court decisions differs from the subject matter in the corpus of published decisions in the U.S. Appellate Courts. A 30-topic model is fit to the entire joint corpus (Supreme Court plus Appellate Court) and systematic differences are found between the subject matter emphases in three corpora: the Supreme Court, the Appellate Court, and Appellate Court cases selected for review. These findings validate topic modeling as a useful methodological approach for studying agenda formation specifically, and open the door to a larger research approach in empirical legal studies based on the application of topic models to the rich textual corpus of legal decisions.The most current version of this paper can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2740126